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A panda is sitting in a bar, polishing off his dinner. He pulls out a gun, fires a shot in the air, and heads toward the exit. A stunned waiter demands an explanation. The panda pauses at the door and tosses the waiter a badly punctuated wildlife manual. “I’m a panda—look it up.” The waiter turns to the appropriate entry: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” [1]

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Beware the missing Oxford comma!

That was the lesson of a recent decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the omission of an Oxford comma in a Maine employment statute created an ambiguity that must be resolved in favor of dairy delivery drivers. For want of a comma, the dairy is out $10 million.

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Is damage resulting from faulty workmanship covered under your CGL policy? In the past, insurers have had success in certain jurisdictions arguing that construction defect cases did not constitute iStock-117230091-300x236a covered “occurrence” because the damage was purportedly not unintended or unexpected. In recent years, however, courts have shifted course; the majority of courts have found that property damage arising out of faulty workmanship constitutes an “occurrence” under standard-form CGL policies. Additionally, some states enacted legislation requiring CGL policies to define occurrence to include property damage or bodily injury resulting from faulty workmanship, or have made it easier for insureds to obtain coverage for damages as a result of work the insureds performed.

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In our previous post, we started answering the question whether specialty cyber policies are likely to respond to two of the top five cyber threats for 2017 identified by Experian Data Breach Resolution in its industry forecast. In this one, we examine the remaining three.

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Cyber sages tell us the question is not whether your business will suffer a data breach, but when. To prepare for the inevitable, businesses want to know what is the next threat on the horizon. In the iStock-498309152-eye-data-abstract-300x200past few months, experts have offered many views on the top cyber trends for 2017, and plenty of advice about security measures companies should take in light of these predictions. But if some loss is a given, businesses also want to know if there will be insurance to cover that loss. We look at some of the forecasts and try to answer that question.

In its Fourth Annual Data Breach Industry Forecast, Experian Data Breach Resolution, a vendor of data breach response and protection services with a track record of handling high-profile incidents, issued and identified five top data breach trends for 2017. We’ll address the first two of those trends in this post.

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The vaults of the world’s financial capital are getting stronger locks. On March 1, 2017, new “first-in-the-nation” cybersecurity regulations of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) went into effect to protect consumers and the financial system from cyber attacks. While the regulations apply to covered finance and insurance companies, their influence is likely to be felt beyond the companies targeted initially. For this reason, it’s important that all companies with cybersecurity risks understand how the new DFS regulations work, and the insurance coverage issues they may raise.

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Construction projects—especially those of any complexity—often experience unexpected delays, resulting in loss of use to the owner. Owners sometimes insure against this risk by getting “Soft Cost” iStock-485271996-clock-and-crane-300x300coverage, which covers certain cost increases resulting from project delay (think higher finance costs). Typically, though, when a construction project experiences an unanticipated delay, everyone—the owner, the builder, the subcontractors and suppliers—is interested in getting the project back on schedule. So owners sometime also get “Expense to Reduce the Amount of Loss” (ERAL) coverage, which covers the cost of accelerating the project to get it back on schedule (think higher costs for additional construction crews and overtime). But if you have both “Soft Cost” and ERAL coverage, do they cancel each other out?

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A few weeks back, we told you how South Carolina May No Longer Hold Insurers’ Reservations. In that post we left you with a teaser: “There’s more to this case.”iStock-537435705-burden-200x300

In fact, Harleysville Group Insurance v. Heritage Communities, Inc. does more than just take insurers to task with regard to their vague reservations of rights. Reaffirming that, in a case involving both covered and excluded losses, the insurer bears the burden of proving which damages are excluded from coverage, Harleysville shows how easily an insurer can find itself in a bind when trying to prove “no coverage” at the same time and in the same proceedings that it is providing a defense for its insured.

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Readers of this blog have come to expect from our lawyers incisive and reliable analysis of the most important insurance coverage issues of the day. At least one judge apparently feels the same way.

In a recent decision in the ongoing coverage dispute brought by TIAA-CREF against its various D&O carriers, Judge Jan Jurden cited a piece written by Peter Gillon in Law360 (“Another Blow Dealt to Restitution, Disgorgement Defense”) as legal authority for her conclusion that “the current trend in New York and additional jurisdictions ‘has been for courts to narrow the [disgorgement] defense considerably,’ and in some cases ‘reject[] insurers’ restitution/disgorgement defense outright.’”

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Barely removed from the Super Bowl, football fans have begun their long hibernation in anticipation of next season. But the Patriots’ incredible comeback reminds me that it coincided with the tenth anniversary of one of the great NFL coach rants, courtesy of the late Dennis Green of the Arizona Cardinals. Coach Green was interviewed after his team blew a 20-0 halftime lead to my beloved Chicago Bears. Using some other choice words, Green said about the comeback kids: “the Bears are who we thought they were!”

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So what does this have to do with insurance? Well, unlike Coach Green, not all policyholders can say that their insurance policies are exactly what they thought they were. A recent Fifth Circuit case, Richard v. Dolphin Drilling Ltd., is such a case. There, the policy exclusions were so broadly construed that 99 percent of the insured’s operations were excluded from coverage.

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Out of the blue one morning, a destination hotel’s operator receives an email informing it that the hotel’s computer and electronic key systems have been infiltrated, leaving the hotel locked out of its iStock-155359193-keycard-200x300own computer system and, even more distressing, preventing hotel guests from utilizing their key cards to gain entry to their rooms and other hotel amenities. The email demands payment in the amount of 2 Bitcoin (approximately $1,900) to restore computer and key card functionality, which will double if not paid by the end of the day. The email provides details to access a Bitcoin wallet to make the payment, and then ends by stating, “Have a nice day!”

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